Software-update: PuTTY 0.53 beta

The feature everyone's been asking for: ANSI printer support. Currently this sends data to the printer in completely raw mode, without benefit of Windows GDI or the printer driver; so it will be fine for anyone whose server already knows what type of printer it expects to be talking to, but probably not ideal for someone who wants to print a text file and have it look nice. A less raw mode of printer access is still on the Wishlist, but is quite a big piece of coding work so it's in the Implausible section.

The other feature everyone's been asking for: PuTTYgen can now import OpenSSH SSH2 private keys, and save them back out in PuTTY's own format. We also plan to add an export feature (so you can convert the other way), and similar support for ssh.com keys, but OpenSSH imports seem to have been the most popular request.

We now ship the PuTTY tool set as an installer, created using Jordan Russell's excellent and easy-to-use Inno Setup. (For the other half of our users, who felt the best thing about PuTTY was that they didn't have to mess around with installers, we still ship the single executables and the zip file, so nobody has to use the installer if they don't want to.)

PuTTY now has a default file extension for private key files: .PPK (PuTTY Private Key). The installer associates this file extension with Pageant and PuTTYgen.

PuTTY now natively supports making its connection through various types of proxy. We support SOCKS 4 and 5, HTTP CONNECT (RFC 2817), and the common ad-hoc type of proxy where you telnet to the proxy and then send text of the form "connect host.name 22". Basic password authentication is supported in SOCKS and HTTP proxies. Many thanks to Justin Bradford for doing most of the work here.

PuTTY now supports a standard set of command-line options across all tools. Most of these options are ones that Plink has always supported; however, we also support a number of new options similar to the OpenSSH ones (-A and -a, -X and -x, and similar things; also the -i option to specify a private key file).

The right-button menu on Pageant's System tray icon now offers the option to start PuTTY (New Session plus the Saved Sessions submenu). This feature is disabled if Pageant can't find the PuTTY binary on startup. Thanks to Dominique Faure.

Added the Features control panel, allowing the user to disable some of the more controversial terminal capabilities.

Added the Bugs control panel, allowing the user to manually control PuTTY's various workarounds for SSH server bugs.

The PuTTY executables and source code are distributed under the MIT licence, which is similar in effect to the BSD licence. In particular, note that the MIT licence is compatible with the GNU GPL. So if you want to incorporate PuTTY or pieces of PuTTY into a GPL program, there's no problem with that.